


Archimedes' Arrow Aims Ever Eastward

by shihadchick



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Magic, Multi, Urban Fantasy, multiple POVs, soft-focus AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 19:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13958268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shihadchick/pseuds/shihadchick
Summary: Zach talks to his sticks.That’s the first thing Josh learns about him, though he doesn’t think much of it at the time.





	Archimedes' Arrow Aims Ever Eastward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Firalla11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firalla11/gifts).



> Thanks to R for betaing, and to the mods for their grace and patience. <3 
> 
> The details in this are deliberately vague, with a lean towards atmosphere over accuracy. Set from the Monster's Calder Cup run through to present day.

Zach talks to his sticks.

That’s the first thing Josh learns about him, though he doesn’t think much of it at the time.

Zach talks to his sticks, but Josh has lived with goalies and that’s not even in the same zip code as some of their weirdass superstitions. So when this apparently amazing baby defenseman turns up in the Monsters’ locker room just in time for the last couple games before the playoffs Josh assumes he’s just there to get his feet wet, to get a taste of things before they all get sent home for the summer.

Not that he’s complaining about how late that summer wound up starting, in the end. Not that he’s complaining one little bit.

The sticks aren’t even the weirdest thing though, in the end.

* * *

The ice sings to Zach, but he can’t always pick out the notes.

It’s not a language, not quite, not in the way where he could have any kind of fluency outside the sharp whistle of steel against water, cutting through on the sheer edge where crystalline structure collapses back into fluid dynamics.

But he can hear it, and sometimes the ice tells him things; whispers of a rut behind the red line, a chip below the circles that will redirect a puck, the grasping desperation of the river-that-was for her children that means sometimes Zach can skate even with the wind, and other times he’s fighting for even a stride.

Zach left the water years and years ago, but it’s never let him go, not entirely.

It’s tricky and it’ll rush up on you if you’re not careful; Zach might be from a land of lakes and rivers, but he knows not to turn his back on the ocean.

It’s a little easier to grasp when it’s frozen solid, of course.

* * *

Josh isn’t particularly surprised when they tell him he’s staying up with the team, that he should get a place and not worry about spending more time on I71 this year.

He’d felt it coming, seen the approval reflected in the eyes of his coaches, of his teammates. He’s been with better and better players, moving up from the fourth line to somewhere where not only is he a big body to throw around, he’s putting shots in the net too. 

It feels somewhat inevitable, reinforcing the way he’s gotten better every year he’s played. He knows he’s in good shape, too, looks the part, and his gaze doesn’t drift at all when he locks eyes with any of the guys who’ve been there a lot longer.

He can keep his head up, knows the guys surrounding him play better with him than they do without him. It’s simple.

Zach isn’t simple though, not even a little.

* * *

Zach’s not dumb, not for real or playing it.

He can feel the draw in Josh’s gaze, the tide pulling him closer, and he likes the way he looks in Josh’s eyes. 

It makes it easier to fit in, in the apartment they share, and on the ice. With the guys. Everyone bounces off Josh and gets a little bit better, picks up some of the sparkle, the edges gilding as they coalesce the way the team just didn’t quite, the year before.

(Zach was watching. It was a bad look, for everyone. He wasn’t exactly sad to be stuck in college then.)

Things come together, steel blades skidding through water, the closest thing to frictionless, and Zach helps that along, where he can.

They need to be a fast team.

Zach’s good at fast.

(Zach falls into bed with Josh exactly once, too sober and prickly and needing it all too much. It’s good, too good, and Zach can feel himself stretching out until it feels like he’s going to break, captivated by the reflections burning deep in Josh’s eyes, refracting endlessly, light through water.

Zach’s from the water, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need an anchor of his own.)

Josh is pretty good at fast, too, and when Zach wakes up the next morning, a little sore and trying to regret it more than he can bring himself to, Josh has gone already.

His sneakers are gone, so Zach assumes he’s running in truth, the same way Zach had wanted to for a heartbeat. It’s too cold to think about that, though; instead Zach finds his way down to the river, stands watching where the Olentangy swirls into the Scioto, reunited, and wonders what he’s doing.

Across the river, a dog barks, and vanishes back into the undergrowth, mottled fur and motion, a spot of warmth.

The water doesn’t have any answers for him.

* * *

“It was good, but--” Zach says to him after, and that’s all he needs to say, really.

It was good, and Josh would do it again in a heartbeat, wants to feel Zach’s beside his, thrumming in time, blood rushing to the same conclusions. The only one of those he can draw is that their timing’s been off, unlike on the ice; something wasn’t quite right.

Zach’s basically his best friend, by then. That’s enough.

It settles into his heart and his history, not quite a regret, a memory he can’t quite put away and never see again. He can see whenever Zach thinks of it, too, the silent moment that shouldn’t be, the pause too long between word and gesture, the faintest crack in their friendship, so fine that most of the time, it’s invisible.

Unless the light’s right on it.

Josh keeps those thoughts for the dark and the dark only.

He keeps skating, and they keep winning, a December silvered over with snow and paper-thin bark gone white on the trees, wins and wins and wins, and not enough time between them to do more than breathe.

Josh bides his time.

He’s got hockey to play, anyway.

* * *

December bleeds into January and success slides away, too many trips to the penalty box, smoked glass shivering and points squandered. They add up, but not quite as quickly.

Zach touches Josh more again, now that they’re back on steady ground, friends and friends only, and it’s a warmth in the cold, a promise of the future, sun-warmed grains of sand and beaches and breaks.

Josh is too big to miss, a solid exclamation point that Zach’s run into face-first more times than he can recall; metaphorically and first thing in the morning, blurred from sleep on his way into the bathroom.

Zach’s the only one who doesn’t get a little better every time he bounces off Josh.

Something was absorbed, but he doesn’t think he’s missing it. It just seems like a fair exchange, although Zach’s suspicious enough of those, however much those brief moments lighten his heart.

* * *

There’s not a whole lot of light, the last few weeks of their season.

Losses piling up seriously for the first time, and crowding in too close on the heels of failures past, and however hard they try, none of them can pull clear enough of that vortex.

Zach comes the closest, and then chaos comes calling for her due in turn.

Zach leaves with nine stitches, a broken orbital bone, and a seat in the press box for their final game.

No one goes home happy, after that.

Josh least of all.

* * *

A new season is a new beginning, and if it’s not as overwhelmingly good as last time, maybe that’s for the best?

Zach decides that maybe distance would solve what familiarity hasn’t, and gets his own place.

It overlooks the river.

The current doesn’t have a whole lot to say; the water hurtles between the banks somewhere between past and potential, never wholly one or the other, white-capped alongside the road. Zach keeps looking just in case, lets his eyes trace the shape of it all, drawn in.

Josh isn’t there, to start, which is unsettling if not unexpected. 

There’s a space where he should be, and they’re all walking and talking around it, aside from Luc who bounds right in, puppyish enthusiasm and glee.

Zach’s barely done being a rookie himself, but they all take him under their wings, pleased and proud, bursting with everything he promises to be.

And the joke’s on everyone who had an opinion to the contrary, because what Luc turns out to be is their center.

There might be a little lurch while everyone catches up with that, eddies swirling through the locker room until they settle into a new normal, but when it works, it works.

And when they get Josh back…

It really works.

* * *

Josh has never played with guys this good before, and he can feel the way it builds through him, energy redoubling and flooding through all three of them, till their line is on fire, is overwhelming, bulldozing through the opposition even if the rest of the team isn’t quite keeping their feet either.

The PB&J line; classic, hilarious, not better, none better, and everyone’s jealous.

(Mirror mirror, on the wall/who’s the prettiest of them all?)

Josh would have to be blind not to notice that Luc’s got a great face.

* * *

Luc’s never felt this overwhelmingly right out on the ice, not even in the Q, and it makes him want to laugh with the sheer joy of it, to run in circles with glee at the way that he’s proving himself, gaining the coaches’ trust, his teammates’.

He tries to soak it all in, absorb every lesson that he needs to learn, take the hits and get back out there harder and faster and more dangerous every time. 

And it’s intoxicating to play with Panarin, to know to expect the pass on his tape even in the most impossible of situations, but despite that, the one he keeps coming back to like his own personal lodestone is Josh.

There’s a glitter in Josh’s eyes that almost no one else seems to notice, slick water rushing over slippery rocks, and it makes Luc want to race around him, chase his own tail, run in circles and howl at the moon.

The nicest thing is that Josh seems to notice something in him, too, and Luc’s the only one who gets Josh’s hand resting heavy on the nape of his neck in passing, thumb scratching at the hair curling damp where his helmet rests.

Zach notices too, and grins at them both, fierce and open, panting to catch his breath between shifts, and Luc shifts uncomfortably on the bench, feeling pinned rather more literally than he should do.

They’re just looking. They’re all just looking.

So after that game, maybe it’s not a surprise when Luc shifts much more pointedly.

* * *

Josh gets his own room on the road now, and Zach plays at envy, lets it trickle through him when he wants the privacy, but mostly he’s glad to still be sharing, to have someone to talk to and wake him up, someone to stir awake with and for.

Luc’s good company; warm and familiar for all that he’s new, and he’s a good roommate.

So it’s galling in the extreme to try and follow Josh into what is his own hotel room only to have Josh throw up an arm to stop him, turning in the doorway and angling his hips into Zach’s, a gentler check than it could’ve been.

“What?” Zach says, doesn’t bother to flavor his tone more than that. 

Josh can pick through the little sticks and stones that rattle in his words, the jetsam of their day, everything Zach hasn’t filtered out already.

“Uh, liney business,” Josh says, and Zach can see the faintest movement in the bed furthest from the door, a rustle of blankets and russet hair shifting against them; Luc curled into an inexplicably tiny ball, apparently.

Josh shoves his own room key into Zach’s open hand, mumbles the room number rather than asking if Zach wants to switch. Zach would protest, but Josh isn’t even looking directly at him.

The door closes in front of Zach’s face, and he blinks, because for the first time, he couldn’t see what Josh was thinking in his face, and he knows that Josh wasn’t giving back whatever Zach was giving him.

Zach’s been trying so hard not to let himself give Josh anything more than he seems to want.

He knows himself; he’s greedy and constant and he can move mountains, if he has to.

If he’s given the time.

* * *

Luc is curled tight, half under the blanket, radiating pure misery, his head buried under one of Zach’s t-shirts, abandoned on top of the sheets whenever they’d left after their pregame naps.

Josh sits beside him, carefully, perched on the very edge of the mattress.

Luc looks so much smaller like this, and Josh isn’t sure he likes it.

“Hey buddy,” Josh says, and Luc whines.

“I’m gonna kick your ass for this if this is just a prank,” Josh says, covering his bases, but on some level he knows it’s not, and so when he reaches out to run his hand along the top of Luc’s head and down his spine to scratch above his tail, it’s with the full knowledge that this is his linemate, his friend.

And that Luc, apparently, is sometimes a wolf.

Or maybe some kind of big dog, Josh isn’t exactly a zoologist, he just knows what he sees and when to believe it.

* * *

Luc wakes up sweating, half-strangled by the pillow he’s wound up under, which proves to be not so much a pillow as a teammate; Josh surfacing murkily when Luc flails away from him.

“What are you-?” Luc starts to demand, before biting his lip, sitting up and trying again. “What happened?” he asks, and tries not to sound too pitiful.

He’s not sure he quite wants to believe what Josh tells him.

Luc’s lost time before, when he was little, or when he was stressed, when he needed a break. He’d never let himself believe it was more than maybe drinking a little too much, like that would account for the shift in perspective, the way the world goes so very black and white for him sometimes.

“Or you’re just a werewolf,” Josh says, shrugging like that’s no big deal, like Luc going four-footed and furry is an embellishment in the rhythm of their every days, nothing too important to worry about. He pauses, adds in a slightly different tone. “I told Zach to bunk in my room for the night just in case. You know. If you didn’t want him to know, too.”

“Zach can know,” Luc replies, not certain why he’s so sure of that, but it feels right, necessary. 

His mouth is dry, after this, or perhaps wolves sleep differently to humans, but Luc feels like he could drain the ocean and still be wanting more. It licks along his bones, impatient, some instinct telling him he’s missing something right underneath his nose.

Josh is still talking. “Honestly, it was fine. You were adorable. All giant paws and bad breath, so, I dunno, I guess the same as normal. Although you shed like crazy as a werewolf, too.”

“I do not,” Luc protests, automatically indignant, and he throws a pillow at Josh.

It bounces right off, just like almost everything, but for just a second, Luc can see the chink of light, the crack where he could get his fingernails in and tug if he was stronger.

“We should go get breakfast,” Luc says, after Josh spends some time staring at his hands, all cockiness and surety gone. “Rescue Zach from your room first, before he thinks you’ve gone totally feral.”

“That’s all you, bud,” Josh says, lazy grin back in place, and Luc shoulder-checks him into the door frame and heads out into the hall.

There’ll be no living with Zach if they leave him ignorant any longer, Luc knows that much for sure.

* * *

Zach is in one of the equipment rooms, his back to the door, murmuring slow and smooth to his sticks, reminding them of what they once were, asking them to help him, to cradle frozen rubber and send it where he wishes. That little extra frisson of accuracy is a standing wave, concave across the laminate, a gentle curve that makes him sure he’s heard.

He could talk to the pucks, too, but that would feel more like cheating.

This is just priming the pump.

Everyone else is used to him by then, and no one blinks at his habits, his careful circles in warmups and the quiet words that rush and babble and brook no argument, under his breath where no one else has to hear it. It helps get his mind on the game, and he’s been doing that just fine for years.

A ripple of laughter across the room draws his attention back, dilutes his focus. Zach is reminded, abruptly, of what Luc and Josh told him.

He might’ve been more skeptical, without that memory of tangled fair hair and a body too small. Without that half-seen vision of fur and flight and the chase, running for the joy of it.

Without thinking of the way that Luc feels against his fingertips, whenever he’s brushed bare skin against his.

Luc’s big, like Josh, but he’s always seemed lighter in his skates, for all that he’s strong on them. On some level, Zach had realized very early on just how Luc could displace him.

It muddies Zach’s focus, and he’s just a fraction out of sync all game, drifting, can’t find the pace of it except in passing.

Time moves at its normal pace when the puck hits his tape, a clean pass from Luc, exactly where Zach needed it to be, and Josh is yelling, open on the goal line. Zach sends the puck to him whisper-quick and devious, deceptively slow. It seems inevitable when the puck careens from there into the back of the net, red light flashing and the crowd yelling their outrage, the visiting fans’ delight surfacing through the roar that rushes in Zach’s ears.

They crash into a hug, the three of them steadied and measured and even, and Josh says, “My room, tonight” before Seth and Bread come flying in to join them, and as quick as it was, Zach knows that message was just for the two of them, rolled up tight and filled with hope.

He’s never felt steadier than with Josh at his left and Luc to his right, counterweighted and called into shore. So sure, Zach’ll be there.

Three seems safer than two, for so many reasons.

[the end]


End file.
